As "Felix9" noted over in the Microsoft Channel 9 Coffee House forum on July 13, the Experiment 19 team has finally gone public. And members of that team are now admitting to have helped "prove... that Windows NT and the CLR (Common Language Runtime) could deliver better performance than Windows CE and the .NET Compact Framework on identical hardware."

This was a bigger and more encompassing project than I had heard. More from the team:

"We started from a Windows core (called MinWin) and a port of the Windows NT kernel to the ARM processor. Working closely with MinWin pioneers—Adam Glass, Mark Russinovich, Richard Pletcher, Richard Neves and Bryce Cogswell—and with partners at NVIDIA (My aside: there's the graphics platform piece of the project), we created the device drivers and firmware necessary to boot and run MinWin on our prototype phones. We created an ARM JIT (just-in-time) compiler for the CLR and ported the CLR runtime to ARM (Another aside by me: Redhawk-related?) To complete the system, we ported the phone implementation of Silverlight to run with our ARM implementation of the CLR."